Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

The European Parliament today formally recognized what has become increasingly clear: some European tech companies have been selling to repressive governments the tools used to surveil democracy activists. In response, it passed a resolution to bar overseas sales of systems that monitor phone calls and text messages, or provide targeted Internet surveillance, if they are used to violate democratic principles, human rights or freedom of speech.

According to Bloomberg, the decision came after a Bloomberg report in August that "a monitoring system sold and maintained by European companies had generated text-message transcripts used in the interrogation of a human-rights activist tortured in Bahrain." The legislation reportedly leaves enforcement to the EU’s 27 member nations.

More than five years ago, EFF filed the first lawsuit aimed at stopping the government's illegal mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans' private communications. Whistleblower evidence combined with newsreports and Congressional admissions revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was tapped into AT&T’s domestic network and databases, sweeping up Americans’ emails, phone calls and communications records in bulk and without court approval.

Current EFF members and donors are invited to join Senior Staff Attorneys Marcia Hofmann and Kurt Opsahl for drinks at a secret Seattle location on Wednesday, August 31st, to discuss that day's hearings on EFF's warrantless wiretapping cases before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court will consider the legality and constitutionality of the now nearly ten-year-old massive domestic surveillance programs that routinely deliver the everyday communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans to the National Security Agency. Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston will argue in Jewel v.

Yesterday, following on his ruling this Spring that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of an Islamic charity's lawyers in 2004 violated federal surveillance law, Judge Vaughn Walker in the Northern District of California federal court issued his final order in the case of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama. The order granted the plaintiffs an award of $2.5 million in money damages and well-earned attorneys' fees for the government's violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the same law underlying many of the claims in EFF's ongoing lawsuits against the NSA's mass surveillance program, Hepting v. AT&T and Jewel v. NSA.